How to add your business to Google Earth in 5 minutes!
Why? Well this is a pretty good question. There are two reasons. The first is vanity. You want your company’s online presence to be so big that its visible from space, right? The second and more common answer is SEO.
So, is this going to make a massive difference to your search ranking? Nope. But that said, it’s my favourite type of SEO. Something you do once, it takes 5 minutes, and it's done forever. Think of it as another online citation for your company. Yet another source that confirms to search engines who you are and where you are based. The more they see, the more they trust your site.
Let's Do It!
We are going to create a .kml file. Add it to our web domain, make a sitemap telling search engines where it lives, and then alter our robots.txt, to tell those bots where the sitemap is. Fortunately, there is an online tool to help.
The online tool lives here. Fill in your company's details and download the .kml file and geositemap at the end. You’re almost done!
Upload both to your website in the top directory. You can see mine https://www.redkitecode.com/geositemap.xml and https://www.redkitecode.com/locations.kml. If you download my .kml file and (you need Google Earth of course) it’ll take you straight there. Your new .kml file should do the same for your business. The tool also has schema that you can add to your home page.
All we need to do now is tell Google, so we’ll change the robots.txt on our site to include this new sitemap so all bots can read it. I should imagine the bingbot will also want to add this to whatever its version of Nokia maps now is, for example. Yahoo, Yandex, they are all connected with mapping software. Let’s make the .kml file available to all search engines by adding your new geositemap to your robots.txt file.
Add the last line with your url to your robots.txt file.
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: https://www.redkitecode.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.redkitecode.com/geositemap.xmlAnd that’s it. If you want to give google a kick in the pants to come and see your site right now, you can go to the Google Webmaster Tools and submit your new sitemap directly, same with Bing, Yandex, Yahoo webmaster tools or whichever. Give it a few days for Google to add it, and then open Google Earth and put your company name into it. You exist!